Emdebian Project History

The project was started by Frank Smith, sponsored by his employer Amirix
in 2000. He saw the potential for Debian to be the basis for embedded
systems and set up the website and domain. Along with a couple of others he
produced the 2.95 toolchains and the emdebsys tool.

Then Amirix work moved the original developer's focus away from Emdebian and the project stalled although numerous people remained interested. Meanwhile many groups and companies around the world were using the embedian toolchain for ARM which proved robust and effective.

Emdebsys work continued in 2001 when Michael Vogt updated things to a
newer CML2 release and Tomek Religa,
sponsored by Aleph One Ltd made it work with
ARM as well as x86 in early 2002. Further development was somewhat
discouraged by the decision of the kernel developers not to incorporate CML2
into the kernel and the subsequent abandonment of development on it by its
author Eric Raymond. Wookey gave a presentation on Emdebsys at the 2002
UKUUG (UK Unix Users Group) conference. Various people have used the
software although I am only aware of one production system released
using it.

In 2001 Wookey took over from Frank as Project Lead, but despite being
enthusiastic failed to find enough time to generate much actual action.
Meanwhile other projects based on Debian were making good progress -
particularly the
familiar project and the
OpenZaurus Project, both of which make approximately Debian-based PDA
distributions. There is significant commonality of purpose between them and
emdebian and we can use each other's tools and code. Wayne Sitton kept the
website updated and gave it a new look. Frank set up a Twiki to further the development of the
"Embedded Debian Guide" but some kind of sourceforge disaster
combined with our shoddy back-up procedures meant that it was lost shortly
after being installed.

In Jan 2003 Liberty Young updated emdebsys to use Kconfig instead of CML2, so
as to keep it in sync with newer kernels. This should give emdebsys a new
lease of life.

During 2003 Emdebian became an official part of Debian as Amirix kindly
agreed to transfer the domain name to SPI, now that they were no longer directly
interested in the project. This move helps Debian support the ever-growing
use of it in embedded sytems, PDAs and special-purpose devices of one sort
or another. Towards the end of 2003 updated the website to the Debian
look, and in Jan 2004 Wookey converted
it to use WML to match the Debian web process.

In October 2003, at the UK LinuxExpo in London a number of interested
Debian developers got together to discuss the future of emdebian and try to
get some action to capitalise on the high level of interest. A very
fruitful discussion ensued which worked out a scheme that Debian FTPmasters
could stomach that could generate a mini-debian distribution. This will
be built independently, but patches will go directly into Debian packages so
that emdebian can be kept current.